The Gaza Strip is famously wracked by political and religious turmoil, but much of its unrest can be traced to family feuds, according to a report by the International Crisis Group. After the second intifada, Israel eviscerated the Palestinian Authority’s security establishment, and clans stepped in to deal with their members’ crimes—up to and including murder. Now these families have consolidated power by establishing their own autonomous zones and quasi-governmental functions. Blood loyalties trump political ones, and Hamas, which took over the government of Gaza in mid-2007, has been unable to extinguish the clan vendettas or to weaken the family bonds that undermine its authority. The clan structures represent a “double-edged sword,” the authors suggest: they are the rare organizing principle that has stayed constant and reliable during a period of deprivation and unrest, arguably preventing a “total collapse” in Gazan society, but at the same time they ensure that Gazans remain persistently divided, which contributes to the growing disorder in the territory. Hamas will have to reconcile with the families, the report argues; otherwise, they will provide a potent focal point for resistance to Hamas’s (often brutal) attempts to consolidate power.

Is there an American analogue to that persistent European scourge, the soccer hooligan? Two economists at the University of Colorado suggest that it could be the college football fan. They find that arrests for all sorts of belligerence and bad behavior rise after home football games—and skyrocket after upsets, whether the home team is on the winning or the losing end. The researchers examined crime data from 26 police stations that had jurisdiction over college campuses from 2000 to 2005, and then compared game-day arrests with typical daily crime stats. Although away games had no effect on the crime numbers, after home games arrests spiked in all the categories studied—from assaults to vandalism. Upsets triggered even greater havoc. Disorderly-conduct arrests jumped by 93 percent after upset victories, for instance, and DUIs increased 57 percent after upset defeats. The authors reject some common psychological explanations for the mayhem—the idea that fans mimic the violence they see unleashed on the gridiron, or the idea that rioting is a way of relieving frustration after a loss. But one thing the authors say they couldn’t discount as a root of game-day evils: lots and lots of booze. Even though all the stadiums in the sample had banned liquor sales, the authors note that “it is difficult to rule out the possibility that the relationship between college football games and aggressive behavior is entirely driven by alcohol consumption.”

The notion that we repress memories of sexual trauma dates back to the dawn of the Freudian era, but three Canadian psychologists report that such memories tend to be among the hardest to repress. The psychologists surveyed 44 women who’d sought counseling for sexual traumas ranging from childhood abuse to assault in adulthood. The women were asked about the persistence of three memories from the same general time in their lives: the sexual trauma, a nonsexual trauma, and a positive experience. The recollections of sexual trauma proved to be the most enduring, and the subjects relayed them with greater detail, emotion, and vividness than the other memories. Curiously, the women were much more likely to think they’d misremembered the sexual trauma than the nonsexual trauma or the positive incident. In effect, trauma survivors excelled at remembering sexual trauma but found it more difficult to recall whether they’d remembered it correctly.

The YouTube presidential debates were just the tip of the iceberg: according to a new Pew Research Center study, Americans are turning increasingly to online sources for election coverage. Although television continues to outperform print newspapers and the Internet as the main source of campaign news, the percentage of people who say they get most of their news about the election from television dropped from 68 percent during the 2004 race to 60 percent in late 2007, while the percentage of people who reported that they turn primarily to the Internet for news about the presidential candidates more than doubled, from 6 percent in 2004 to 15 percent at the end of 2007. Nearly half of 18-to-29-year-olds report that they get most of their election news online, compared with 21 percent in 2004. The Internet gets slightly higher marks for objectivity: 45 percent of the people who consume news online believe that Republican and Democratic views get roughly equal attention on political Web sites and blogs, whereas 41 percent of all Americans feel the same way about general media coverage of the campaigns. However, the new media landscape may be less diverse than some of the hype would suggest: the study finds that online readers relied overwhelmingly on only a few popular news sites, with MSNBC, CNN, and Yahoo News topping the list. And the growing popularity of political coverage on the Internet doesn’t necessarily correlate with a rising appetite for news. As the study reports, “a majority of web users … say they ‘come across’ campaign news and information when they are going online to do something else.”